Nameless: A Tale of Beauty and Madness (12 page)

T
WO DAYS LATER,
C
AMI WAS STILL THINKING ABOUT
that funny smile of his. A present, from someone who didn’t have a whole lot. Someone who couldn’t really afford a bunch of presents. Someone she didn’t owe something to.

It was a new thing. Unfortunately, she wasn’t left to brood in peace.

“You don’t look so good,” Ruby whispered, reaching over to touch Cami’s forehead.

Cami ducked away, her braid swinging. “I f-feel fine.” The stutter wasn’t so bad today. The bone pin, slid through her braid, was oddly heavy, and everything seemed too colorful to be real.

She hadn’t seen Tor since. There had been another alarm in the middle of the night, Trig and his security team arriving to find that charms laced through the ancient stone walls had forced something back,
again
, from the Vultusino grounds. She wouldn’t have known if she hadn’t been already awake from yet another bad nightmare, sweat-soaked and gasping, hearing soft commotion elsewhere in the darkened house.

But Marya wouldn’t tell her what had happened, and Trig didn’t show up. And Stevens only asked her again if she wouldn’t prefer Chauncey to drive her to school?

No
, she’d snapped, without the stutter for once, and he had nodded and retreated.

Weak winter sunlight slid through high windows; Sister Grace-Redeeming’s classroom was brimful of the quiet murmur of girls bent over paper, pencils scratching. Ruby shrugged, the gold dangles on her earrings winking. She hunched back over her Provincial History book. It was odd—the only thing looking washed-out today was her friend’s bright copper mane. Every other edge pressed against Cami’s skin even through empty air. Even the dust was painful.

Plus, Cami was itching all over. Maybe it was the wool of the blazer, or just her wanting to be
gone
. She didn’t even want to go back home, it was too far. Just a closet, or maybe a forgotten corner. Any quiet dark place would have done, just so she could sit and breathe a bit.

She tried to read, but the letters were dancing on the page. The itch was somehow
under
her skin. A steady irritation, building, a hot prickle of temper.

If I’m angry, why does it scare me?
She took a deep breath, staring at the paper in front of her.

The door opened, and a ripple passed through the classroom. Ellie, her eyebrows drawn together and a terrific bruise glaring on the left side of her face, shook her sleek blonde hair down and stamped for the head of the room. She handed a slip of pink paper to Sister Grace, who woke up long enough to nod and murmur something that sounded kind.

Ellie shrugged and hitched her schoolbag up on her shoulder. Turned, her skirt flaring, and stamped to her seat. Her knees were bruised too, and the way she held her bag said that it hurt.

Ruby was bolt-upright. “
What the hell?
” she mouthed, but Ellie wasn’t looking. She dropped down on Cami’s other side, fishing a pair of shades out of her blazer pocket and jamming them on.

It didn’t hide the fact that someone had socked her a good one. The Strep didn’t hit her in the face often. Maybe it was one of the boyfriends. Who knew?

I know.
A terrible, nasty, guilty heat bloomed behind Cami’s breastbone. The blazer.

Maybe it wasn’t that. Don’t leap to conclusions.

She slid her book over, so Ellie could get the page number. She also silently slid her notes over. Sister Grace went back to dozing, the girls went back to scratching with their pencils—and whispering about Ellie’s arrival. The ghoulgirls were hungry for gossip, the bobs would be asking about it, and the fluffs were ready for talk-meat, as always. Gossip was juicy, and even Ruby’s glower couldn’t keep all of it away.

The irritation under Cami’s skin mounted another few notches.

Ellie just sat for a few moments, her shoulders shaking imperceptibly. Cami’s heart was in her throat. Her friend was in her ancient school blazer, shiny-collared and wearing down, fraying beginning at the elbows.

She could suddenly
see
it, in vivid color—the Strep tearing the new blazer away.
You little slut, where did you get the credits for this?
Ellie’s hands like little wounded white birds as they fluttered ineffectually, the Strep screaming as Potential flashed and the new blazer shredded to ribbons.

Anger, hot and vicious, sank sharp claws into the back of Cami’s throat. The itching all over her threatened to pop out through her skin. She fidgeted, and Ellie’s head slowly, very slowly turned.

The mirrored lenses of Ellie’s shades showed her reflection. Cami didn’t look like herself—her eyes too big, her face dead-white, the stray bits of hair pulled free from her braid lifting on a breeze from nowhere. The bone pin stuck out, its little colorless dangles gleaming, and its sharp tip jabbed at her nape again. There was a little raw spot where it kept rubbing.

God
damn
it.
She reached up, yanked the pin free, and laid it carefully in the pencil groove at the top of the ancient wooden desk. Ellie shifted, her blank lenses following the pin.

Cami flipped to a fresh sheet of paper.
You OK?

Ellie fished a pencil and her history book out. Her notebook was battered too, but she opened it and made the date notation. She leaned over, and Cami’s anger evaporated like steam from one of Marya’s kettles.

NO
, Ellie scrawled on Cami’s paper.
Later.
Who gave you that?

Cami shrugged. Now that the terrible fury had subsided she was queasy, her head aching and the discomfort all over her like crawling razor-legged insects.
A guy
, she wrote.

Don’t take anything else.
Ellie flipped her textbook open. Cami swallowed her retort—she could feel the stutter knotting just behind her lips, a brick wall between her and anything she might want to say. Ellie paused, then leaned over and wrote carefully:
There might be charm on it
.

Ellie was just slopping over with Potential, wasn’t she. She’d be able to see charm Cami wouldn’t.

But Tor wouldn’t charm her. He just didn’t have the Potential. Besides, he didn’t have to. She was halfway-charmed already; she liked him. Whatever he was after when he talked to her, at least she knew she didn’t goddamn well
owe
him anything.

So now I’m stupid. Can’t do anything right
. She hunched her shoulders, and the prickling all over her went away as she took a deep breath. Her fingers, tense around the creaking pencil, relaxed a little, then a little more.

Ruby peered around her, a tendril of curling russet hair falling in her eyes. She blew it away irritably, and there were two bright fever-spots high on Rube’s cheeks.

She was
pissed
.

Sister Grace finally resurrected herself at quarter-till, announced a quiz for the next day, and smiled pacifically at the wave of groans. Her round, plump face, flour-pale, framed in black and white, was a serene moon. The Mithrus beads tied to her sash clicked as she passed to the board and wrote the night’s homework in her flowing copperplate script. Cami’s shoulders twitched and she inhaled deeply—chalk dust, a touch of sweat, the funky smell of a room used to corral kids for long periods of time, a breath of clove and invisible fuming from Ruby on her right. From Ellie, nothing but the faint aroma of harsh soap and the also-invisible smell of misery.

The crystals on the bone pin glinted. She was going to have to ask Tor about—

The pin twitched. Ellie tensed.

It hopped out of the pencil groove. Cami let out a soft sound and grabbed for it, but Sister Grace was saying something, and the slight noise was lost. Also lost in Sister Grace’s droning reminder that
chapel is after lunch, ladies, don’t be late
, was the sound of the pin splintering as it hit the blue-flecked linoleum.

What the—
Cami sank back down in her seat. Broken in three pieces, the bone pin rolled away. She grabbed the edge of the desk to keep herself from diving for it, since Sister Grace had turned around and was scanning the classroom intently, looking fully awake for the first time in months.

Ellie’s breathing had turned rapid, her fists clenched. A tear glittered on her bruised cheek, and Cami could see where the back of her earring had scraped on her neck, probably when whoever-it-was belted her.

It
was
the Strep.
Sudden knowledge rode a cresting tide of nausea. Sweat had gathered in Cami’s armpits, dewed her lower back and her forehead. Everything was too
bright
, and Sister Grace’s gaze passed over them all like the shadow of a giant drifting bird.

“Ladies,” Sister Grace finally said, “you are excused.” The tinkling charmbell rang to signal the end of third session and the beginning of lunch, and Ruby sighed dramatically.

“’Bout damn time,” she announced as a surfburst of chatter swallowed the room. “Who do I gotta kill, Ellie?”

Cami wriggled out of her side of the desk. The shards of the bone pin were numb-cold, frost-burning her trembling fingers, and the crystal beads had disappeared, rolling away under desks and feet. Her stomach cramped, then eased all at once, and she couldn’t bring herself to throw the remains of the pin away. So she simply jammed the pieces in her bag while Ellie began explaining what had set the Evil Strepmother off this time. Ellie’s cheeks were wet, Ruby was furious, and Cami was secretly, shamefully glad that nobody was paying any attention to her.

R
UBY WAS A BALL OF SIMMERING RAGE FROM LUNCH
onward, swearing to give the Strep a taste of her own medicine; Ellie admitted it was the new school blazer that had set the Strep off.

The blazer Cami had brought in the money for, so it would arrive charm-boxed at her door the next morning. Which meant Cami was responsible. Though they both kindly refrained from pointing this out, the knowledge churned at her the whole time, hot and sour.

And then there was the pin. Tor’s gift, broken. He’d just
given
it to her, and he wasn’t asking anything in return, right? Nothing except being her friend.

You need a friend that listens.

She hadn’t stuttered so much when the pin was in her hair, had she? She’d been feeling fine for the entire two days.
Better
than fine, even. Secretly pleased.

And he wasn’t a charmer—his Potential would be low. He was only a garden boy, after all.

The last bell rang and she dawdled, Ruby and Ellie at their side-by-side lockers. They didn’t stop to preen today—with Ellie’s face the way it was, of course they wouldn’t. So Cami just waited until both of them had their heads deep in their lockers and let the crowd of girls whisk her away, around the corner from the main stairwell.

Today of all days, she couldn’t stand the thought of getting into the Semprena and listening to Ruby fume.

You weren’t supposed to go off Juno’s grounds by foot, but there were ways. She took the back stairs to the gym, slid out past a chattering gaggle of cheersport girls—bright-eyed, smooth-haired, and chirping like Twisted cockatiels. The fire door was supposed to be locked and alarmed, but Ruby had shown her how to slip a bit of charmed tinfoil—
one of those things a girl should never be without if she intends to be up to no good
, Rube always said—over the connector and slip out while it was resetting itself.

The sudden cold was a blow. The sky was a featureless iron blanket, and the metallic smell of a hard freeze filled her nose. She shivered, but it was too late now—the door thudded closed, and she was faced with a narrow strip of pavement between two frowning brick walls. At the far end, a dustbin crouched, and past it there would be a way down the hill, screened from the lacrosse and football fields by thick spiny heartsthorn, naked without its glossy summer green and bright red berries. The bushes were defense-charmed too, so she had to be careful not to brush against them.

She edged along, carefully, past the dustbin breathing out a reek of garbage even through the killing cold. The heartsthorn rustled a bit as she passed, not-quite-sensing her. Juno’s thick stone wall lifted on her right, veined with long fingers of red ivy. Cami tightened her scarf, her knees already chilled and her coat flapping as she hurried.

But careful, cautious, just like a little mouse.

There was the gate—tiny, wooden, overgrown with heartsthorn. To the side, there was a gap between the post and the wall. It wasn’t used
too
often—just enough to keep it clear. If it started getting worn through, the Sisters would find out and patch it, and everyone would have to find a new way.

Cami wriggled through, holding her breath.

Outside was a narrow alley, frost-slick cobblestones that probably dated from the post-Reeve rebuilding of New Haven. The windowless back of a warehouse loomed, unmarked except for the occasional schoolgirl graffiti traced down low where Juno girls could reach.
Sheela sucks
something-scratched-out, and
Kill Juno
, in black, with arrows pointing to it to show agreement. Something about a Sister Mary Clarice, though there wasn’t a Sister of that name at the school now. Other scrawls and symbols, none of them alive with charm but managing to glow with feeling just the same.

Her feet crunched and slid, and by the time she reached the end of the alley and peeked out into a weedy, snowbound vacant lot, she was shivering from fear
and
cold.

This is pretty anticlimactic. What did I expect, monsters to eat me the moment I stepped off school grounds?

Well, yes. Wasn’t that what was supposed to happen?

Did Tor feel this cold and alone when he walked? Was he used to it? She could ask him, she supposed. If her stupid tongue would let her.

The wind picked up, and she heard dogs barking.

No, not barking.
Baying.
Hate that sound.
It reminded her of snow, of headlights, of a rat’s plated tail and bright red eyes. She pushed the memory aside, but it didn’t want to go.

That was one thing about school and Ruby and Ellie. They kept her head so busy the nightmares couldn’t creep up through waking consciousness and poke at her.

Another galvanic shudder worked its way down her spine. She pulled her mittens on and set off around the edge of the field. Her maryjanes slipped and slid, and at least her knee socks were wool, but this was looking to be a very long and uncomfortable walk home. New Haven wheeled around her, cold blighted core radiating bright charmed streets, and she put her head down. Her braid lay heavy against her back, as if the pin was still thrust through it.

He walks all the time. It can’t be that hard.
She settled her schoolbag higher on her shoulder.
Besides
,
I’ve come this far. I might as well keep going.